Why work at ABBYY? Part one

The first part of the detailed answer promised in my previous post . The second will follow a little later (update: the second read here ).

So let's go. What for? Then, that is not boring here. This is among other things. When work does not interfere with living, but on the contrary brings a very pleasant variety into it, it does not seem at all burdensome. I will try to reveal this statement and just tell you what is happening here. You look, and people will reach out to us.

Warm clothing and hot food are guaranteed practically free work hours, a gym in the office, good fitness 5 minutes walk from the office, the opportunity to learn English with a carrier, quite decent salaries (yes, in this post, too, about them only in passing ) and other small pleasures of life, as in all normal companies.
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But, of course, not only these things prevent us from being bored. We have other mechanisms for this. The people do not quench at all, and actively communicate between departments, finding out from whom it is possible to steal the code, who does what and how to solve this or that problem, using the experience already gained.

Next - workshops for developers. Questions - from exploring the new features of the base libraries, new techniques and technologies (for example, the use of XML and XSLT - just do not tell me that they are not new :) to good and bad design patterns. Of course, experienced programmers there are often more for parties, but it is also interesting for them, for young people such seminars are generally very useful. And they teach us for a reason. Those who successfully increase their knowledge and apply, usually quite quickly go to growth. In one and a half or two years, interns can reach the level of a development team leader and take possession of some complicated subsystem or even a whole small product.

Those who, apart from technical ones, also display managerial skills, can go even further. In the end, in our company, almost all key executive positions in the company are occupied by former programmers (almost all department directors, for example, and even the financial director). It is rumored that even our current CEO once programmed. Even if the opportunity to run with a whip does not attract, you can continue to “go to tech”, as gamers say. That is, to confirm more and higher skills in the programmer part. Such a procedure is called certification : you send the code of a special commission, it is evaluated by two experts, who are more titled than certified, give an assessment, the commission makes a decision on its basis - and voila, hello, a new level of consumption of material goods. By the way, without confirmation of a good qualification, they will not even give a chance to steer with something serious, so this thing is not only monetary, but also significant in professional terms. By the way, forcing a qualified programmer to manage other programmers, no one will be against his will, so certification is not harmful in any way.

And we have St. George's Day the possibility of a fairly free transition between projects. If a person is fed up with what he does, but what is happening in the next section is interesting, then he will most likely be met and transferred. True, if there is, to whom to hand over the case, and in the receiving department there is work. But so far, no one is particularly opposed to changing the project employee once every three or four years, so the internal recruiting mechanism works for itself.

Projects, projects ... and what projects, you ask. In general, the work of programmers in the company has two main areas: technology and products. The first is a painstaking, complex, but very interesting way of expression. Very intelligent and enthusiastic people are working here. They constantly think with their heads, read smart books and wrinkle their foreheads. The output is the next version of the technology, which, although a little (and sometimes very well), is superior to the previous one. Work here makes, as I understand it, primarily vocation, plus the consciousness of involvement in the development of science, albeit applied. In general, it is interesting. This direction includes various recognition engines, document analysis, image processing, and export, all of which relate to the OCR / ICR direction, and a wide range of linguistic projects that I can hardly tell about without special knowledge. As an example, you can take vocabulary engines and morphology.

It is clear that technology is not a self-sufficient thing, it is a necessary basis for the work of the second direction - grocery. There, of course, software products are made, both for the end user (Lingvo, FineReader, PDF Transformer, mobile products) and for developers (Engine, Recognition Server, Mobile OCR). In addition to a large selection of projects, there are also more diverse tasks within each project. Someone is interested in making beautiful windows, someone loves and knows how to design the internal structure of the project. Constantly there are tasks that have not been solved yet. For example, to integrate with SharePoint, build the recognition engine in the MFP, to make a mobile product on a new platform. Plus, it is clear for whom this is all done: here is the released product, but its users on the Internet are discussing.

In short, so. Someone will say that all this activity is standard for a programmer working in a software development company. That's right, no one argues. But this is only directly related to work. And then there is the underwater part of the iceberg, and I’ll talk about it in my next post, that is, in the second part of the answer.

Konstantin Tarachev
Head of Mobile Linguistic Applications Development Group

UPD. For a few, but insistent requests link to how to get to us . Plus a list of open positions .